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"The Founding Fish, John McPhee's twenty-sixth book, is a braid of personal history, natural history, and American history, in descending order of volume. McPhee is a shad fisherman. He waits all year for the short spring season when delicious American shad - Alosa sapidissima - leave the ocean in hundreds of thousands and run up rivers heroic distances to spawn. He approaches them with a catch-and-eat philosophy. After all, their specific name means "most savory."".
"McPhee presents his obsession in bold and spirited prose, laced with humor. His research illuminates the sometimes surprising relevance of this fish in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, and its unique appeal to imaginative historians. George Washington was a commercial shad fisherman - in 1771, he caught 7,760 American shad. The fish had a cameo role in the lives of Henry David Thoreau and John Wilkes Booth.
Planked shad (shad nailed to a board and broiled before an open fire) was invented by the Colony in Schuylkill, a Philadelphia fishing club founded in 1732, which now considers itself the fourteenth of the fifty-one united states."--BOOK JACKET.
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Previews available in: English
Subjects
Shad fishing, American shad, American shad., History, Fishing, north americaPlaces
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Book Details
First Sentence
"I hadn't been a shad fisherman all my days, only seven years, on the May evening when this story begins-in a johnboat, flat and square, anchored in heavy current by the bridge in Lambertville, on the wall of the eddy below the fourth pier."
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- Created April 29, 2008
- 10 revisions
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October 12, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
August 14, 2020 | Edited by ImportBot | import existing book |
May 26, 2011 | Edited by Sai Shankar | merge authors |
April 30, 2011 | Edited by OCLC Bot | Added OCLC numbers. |
April 29, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from amazon.com record |